Phase Diffusion of Light Immersed In Quantum Tides: Open Quantum System Approach

TL;DR

This paper models the interaction between primordial gravitational waves and electromagnetic fields as an open quantum system, revealing non-Markovian dynamics and unique phase diffusion behavior due to the quantum nature of the GW background.

Contribution

It introduces a novel open quantum system approach to describe EM field phase diffusion caused by inflationary gravitational waves, highlighting non-Markovian effects and specific quartic phase noise growth.

Findings

EM phase variance grows as 4(t/τ_c)^4 due to PGWs

Non-Markovian dynamics caused by large correlation time of PGWs

Phase diffusion linked to two-mode squeezed nature of PGWs

Abstract

The interaction between quantum gravitational waves (GWs) and electromagnetic (EM) fields is investigated within the open quantum system formalism, where GWs are considered as a heat bath reservoir occupying a generic state $\hat{\rho}_{\text{gws}}$. Following the quantum Langevin equations, it turns out that the correlations of the Langevin noise operator associated with the GW background directly determine the statistical properties of the EM phasor $\phi(t)$. We apply this formalism to the background of inflationary-generated primordial gravitational waves (PGW). Since this background has an astronomically large correlation time, of the order of the Hubble time $H_0^{-1}$, we show that it leads to a non-Markovian dynamics of the EM field, which causes memory effects. As a result of the Gaussianity of PGW, it turns out that the EM phasor goes through a stochastic process, which is a manifestation of the fluctuation-dissipation in EM-GW system. The variance of the EM phase smears out as $\Delta^2\varphi(t)= \Delta^2\varphi_0+ 4(t/\tau_c)^4$, where the characteristic time scale $\tau_c$ is associated with the diffusion rate caused by PGWs. The specific quartic growth of the phase noise is thus attributed to the two-mode squeezed nature of PGWs, which is inherently different from the phase diffusion induced by vacuum fluctuations of spacetime or a thermal heat bath of gravitons.